State Official Appointed by de Blasio as Leader of Child Welfare Agency

Mayor-elect Bill de Blasio announced Sunday that Gladys Carrión, center, was his choice to run New York City’s Administration for Children’s Services. He previously picked Lilliam Barrios-Paoli, left, to be his deputy mayor for health and human services.Credit
James Estrin/The New York Times

Mayor-elect Bill de Blasio on Sunday named a top state social services official to serve as his child welfare commissioner, installing an experienced leader atop an agency with a history of failing the children it serves and bedeviling mayors who try to reform it.

The appointee, Gladys Carrión, will lead the New York City Administration for Children’s Services, which investigates child neglect and abuse and oversees foster care — a place where “there’s still so much more to do,” Mr. de Blasio said.

“We still, persistently, as a city, as a society, miss opportunities to protect children,” he said. “And we must do better.”

Ms. Carrión, 62, who lives in the Bronx, has served for the last seven years as commissioner of the New York State Office of Children and Family Services. She also worked under Mayor David N. Dinkins as commissioner for the city’s Community Development Agency.

In a news conference at a Lower East Side social services organization, Mr. de Blasio said he had known Ms. Carrión for two decades and called her a “change agent and a reformer” with passion and a sense of urgency.

“She’s devoted her whole life to our children,” he said, “and she understands from her own life story what it’s like for children to come up in humble circumstances and struggle, and understands how much it is our obligation to protect them all.”

Ms. Carrión said she would focus on preventive services to protect vulnerable children. “We need to focus on tightening the system so that no child falls through the cracks,” she said.

The Administration for Children’s Services, with about 6,500 employees and a budget of $2.8 billion, supervises about 12,000 children in foster care and provides preventive services to 22,000 other children and their families.

The announcement was the latest addition to the cabinet of Mr. de Blasio, a Democrat, who won the mayoral election in November with 73 percent of the vote. He will be sworn in on Jan. 1.

Although he has yet to pick a schools chancellor, Mr. de Blasio has made a number of other top appointments, including his first deputy mayor, Anthony E. Shorris; his police commissioner, William J. Bratton; and his budget director, Dean Fuleihan.

Like Ms. Carrión, all have long records of government service, in some cases going back to the last two Democratic mayoral administrations. Asked on Sunday where Republicans might fit into his plans, Mr. de Blasio, who has promised to assemble a team “that mirrors the glorious diversity of this city,” at first made light of such bipartisanship.

Mr. de Blasio then turned more serious. He described how inclusivity could be reimagined at his City Hall and said his team so far had people from the Koch, Dinkins, Giuliani and Bloomberg administrations.

“You know what?” he said. “It’s a free country. We consider Republicans, too, but they have to share our values. That might be a high bar for some Republicans.”

As for child welfare, Mr. de Blasio said it was a mission he was committed to and had focused on for years. He said that the agency was charged “literally with some of the most important work the government does,” but that gaps still existed.

Ms. Carrión now finds herself preparing to lead an agency that had faced considerable criticism over the years and was the subject of renewed scrutiny after the death in 2010 of Marchella Pierce, a 4-year-old girl who was drugged, beaten and tied to a bed by her mother and grandmother, even as the family was under the supervision of the agency. Last week, two former employees of the agency pleaded guilty to misdemeanor charges relating to the Marchella’s death.

The employees, Damon T. Adams, a caseworker with the agency, and Chereece M. Bell, a supervisor, reached an agreement with prosecutors after initially being indicted on charges of criminally negligent homicide, a felony. The case led the Brooklyn district attorney, Charles J. Hynes, to start a grand jury investigation into “evidence of alleged systemic failures” at the agency.

The grand jury released a report laying much of the blame on the agency for the deaths of Marchella and 18 other children since 2007. The report said the agency needed to hire more workers, to train them better and to provide them with better resources and supervision.

Before Marchella’s death, the beating death of 7-year-old Nixzmary Brown in 2006 brought to light several shortcomings at the agency and set in motion an extensive re-engineering, including establishing a reinforced monitoring system for children in troubled homes. Mr. de Blasio called that episode “one of the greatest wake-up calls this city has ever received when it comes to our children.”

The agency was also restructured roughly a decade earlier, after the death of 6-year-old Elisa Izquierdo, who was beaten to death by her mother in 1995.

“Tragedy after tragedy, we have learned and we shouldn’t have to wait for a tragedy to learn,” Mr. de Blasio said. “But when we have had these horrible moments I can say with assurance we’ve moved forward, we’ve made reforms, but there’s so much more to do.”

A version of this article appears in print on December 23, 2013, on Page A23 of the New York edition with the headline: State Official Appointed By de Blasio as Leader of Child Welfare Agency. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe